


The contemplations of one Lavernius Tucker

by Gwenjamin



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Post-Season/Series 13, chucker if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 11:42:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30021264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gwenjamin/pseuds/Gwenjamin
Summary: Tucker sits, at the edge of the beach on Iris. He sits alone, watching the waves hit the shore and come back. They’re dependable. They leave, they come back, they leave again. Just like Church, he finds himself thinking. Church always comes back, he always does.
Relationships: Leonard L. Church & Lavernius Tucker
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	The contemplations of one Lavernius Tucker

**Author's Note:**

> Aka i, the author, have feelings.

Iris feels empty at first. It stands above Chorus, visible every night, but being on it is a different story. It feels like paradise, untouched by the hands of humans, and that’s exactly the problem.

It’s too perfect. Too good. The bases are pristine, high tech. The water is clean. They have enough food to last them ages.

Tucker sits, at the edge of the beach on Iris. He sits alone, watching the waves hit the shore and come back. They’re dependable. They leave, they come back, they leave again. Just like Church, he finds himself thinking. Church always comes back, he always does.

That’s what he keeps telling himself, but deep down he knows, he knows even though he won’t bring himself to tell anyone. Church is gone, for good. There aren’t any other versions of him waiting to be activated, there isn’t another body for him to inhabit. He is gone.

Everyone else knows this too, but they're still holding onto hope, hope that maybe, just maybe, there's still some small fragment left of him.

And there is. He’s scattered all over the world now, but also, he’s scattered in Tucker’s mind. Glimpses of thoughts, of words struggling to be heard. Church didn’t just die, he knows that. He split himself into pieces too small to hold a consciousness, too small to be Church. But they’re there.

He just wishes he knew how to put them back together, even though he knows that’s impossible.

The waves crash onto shore, leaving behind pockets of foam in the sand. He wonders, vaguely, how it works on a moon. He remembers learning about how, on earth, the moon is the thing controlling the tides. Maybe the gravity here is just different. He’s not into science, he doesn’t just know things like this.

(Church does. Did)

Everyone still wears their armor. Old habits die hard, and it seems like every time they get a chance to relax, something happens and they’re dragged on yet another adventure. At least, that’s what Grif always says. He’s not wrong.

He catches a glimpse of a hologram. Church, sitting on a rock. Tucker blinks and he’s gone.

Tucker feels alone. And he remembers the desert, how he had shut himself in that temple because he couldn’t let CT get to it, he couldn’t let CT win. And he had been alone, for days, weeks, he doesn’t know how long it was. He had stopped counting after day five. He remembers sitting there, in the dark, listening to the shouting from outside as they had attempted to get in. Hoping that any second now, command would send backup. Hoping that any second now, Donut would come back. Fuck, there was a point where he even hoped that htey would break down the door, just so he could be in the presence of other people again.

Carolina sits down next to him, and Tucker is thrown out of his thoughts, brought back into reality. She takes off her helmet, red hair blowing in the wind. Tucker feels a little better, not being alone. He stares off into the horizon. For a moon, Iris is awfully like a planet, with plants and animals and everything.

“I miss him too,”Carolina says, after a long bout of silence. Her words shatter the silence that hung heavy in the air, like a ray of sun cutting through the fog. Tucker puts his face into his hands and begins to cry, Carolina putting her arm around his back. Tucker can’t remember the last time he cried. When Church died the first time, he wasn’t sad. Just angry. When he was alone in the desert, he was too dehydrated to cry. When Church had died again he was still angry. When he had woken up with the rebels, he had been too proud to cry. The last time he cried, really, truly, actually cried, was probably when he was sixteen and his mother had died.

It feels strange, to be sobbing. Other people seem to do it with ease. To just let the feelings out like a faucet, let them flow for everyone to see and to not bottle them up, to not pretend that you’re too cool to feel. To not bury your emotions deep down where no one can find it, create an armor of jokes, not letting the comments hit you where you’re vulnerable.

He had always been told that crying made him weak. Like less of a man. But sitting here, crying in Carolina’s arms he doesn’t feel weak. He doesn’t feel strong, either. He just feels human.

He sits up, after a while. Dries off his eyes, walks to the base. It’s dark by now, the light from the sun long gone behind the mountains in the distance. He walks inside, finds Wash cooking food in the kitchen. Tucker can’t remember the last time he had real food, made in a real kitchen, and not just army rations or whatever they had managed to cook up back at the blue bases in Blood Gulch, Valhalla, and everywhere else they stayed.

Tucker realizes he’s tired, now, really, really tired. His eyelids are heavy, and he just feels like collapsing into bed.

But when he does, his thoughts are haunted by Church. He sees him, again, sitting on the table across from his bed. Church waves, as if he’s taunting him, and then he’s gone again. Tucker rubs his eyes. No sign of Church anywhere.

He stands up, paces around his room. Any hint of exhaustion has faded, and he just wants to move. To run, to fight. It feels wrong to be relaxing, because surely there’s got to be something that’s calling their name. Some quest, some adventure.

He sits back down again. There isn’t anything, he’s here, right now, and he should sleep, he knows this. But every time he closes his eyes Church stares back at him and so he doesn’t sleep He can’t sleep.

He pulls out a communicator and calls Junior. He’s been told that Junior’s doing well in school, that he’s got a basketball scholarship and Tucker’s never been more proud. But he wants to see his kid, to talk to him, he doesn’t want to be the same kind of dead-beat dad that his own father was to him. They’ve told him that Junior can come here for the summer, stay with him. But Tucker wants to see him now. He clicks on the icon, an image of Junior as a baby in Blood Gulch, and he finds himself missing Blood Gulch again. 

He’s stopped from reminiscing, from missing Blood Gulch too much by Junior’s face suddenly filling the screen. Tucker grins, a real, genuine smile, the first one he’s had in days.

“Hey!’ Tucker says. “Long time no see!”

“Dad!” Junior says. Junior doesn’t quite speak english, and Tucker doesn’t quite speak sangheili, but they can understand each other just fine, through a strange mix of both languages.

Tucker wishes he could hug Junior through the screen.

“How have things been going at school?” Tucker asks.

“Good,” Junior says. “I misses you,”

“I missed you too, buddy,” Tucker says. “You been being good?”

Junior nods. Tucker looks at his kid through the screen. He seems so big now, so much bigger than the last time Tucker saw him. He remembers when he was a kid, and adults were always telling him how fast he grew up, and how those years when he’s a kid don’t last long. He had never gotten it, the years had felt like forever when he was young, but now he gets it. Although his mother hadn’t had to deal with an alien child that grew a whale lot faster than your average human.

“How’ve you been?” Junior asks, and Tucker pauses, trying to figure out how to answer the question. Because, to tell the truth, Tucker has not been doing good. But he can’t just tell his kid that, he can’t exactly tell his kid about everything that’s happened in the last couple of months, the last couple of days.

“I’ve been doing good,” Tucker says, putting on a smile.

“They told me what happened,” Junior says slowly, struggling to find the right words. “You kicked ass,”

“Yeah,” Tucker says. “Yeah, I did.” It had been awesome for a while, to just have so much power. Suddenly he could understand how the Meta might have felt, with so many things to do, so many options available. He had been unstoppable, no one could get through him. Until the power started to fade, and the armor had become nothing but dead weight.

“And...epsilon? Junior says, his mouth struggling to form the correct sounds.

“Church,” Tucker corrects. “His name is Church.”

“Church,” Junior says. “He’s...gone?”

Tucker nods.

“He was your friend?”

Tucker nods again, but he doesn’t know how to explain that Church was never just a friend. That they had spent a while, alone, in a box canyon with no one but each other. How Tucker had been devastated when Church originally died, even though he would never admit it to Church. How Tucker hadn’t wanted to leave to be an ambassador, how when Church had come back as Epsilon and he didn't even know who Tucker was, Tucker had been crushed. & how Tucker had felt, when Church abandoned them all to go with Carolina, how angry he had been when Church came back. Church was his best friend, there was no denying that, but is best friend a strong enough word for what they;’d been through together?

“I‘m sorry,” Junior says.

“It’s okay,” Tucker says, even though it’s not. “He always comes back,” he lies. Church shows up in the corner of his vision again, and shakes his head.

“Bye, I’ll see you again soon,” Tucker says. He hangs up the call and lays down on his bed, staring at the blank ceiling. The blank ceiling that looks too much like sand, the blinking light of the communicator that looks too much like the epsilon unit. The empty suit of armor sitting in the corner, the Meta’s armor. Church, split into pieces so small, scattered throughout the armor, scattered throughout Tucker’s brain.

He wonders if epsilon is still scattered in Wash’s brain, too. 

He remembers when he was a kid and had trouble sleeping, how his mother had put up glow in the dark stars on his ceiling so that even if he was just laying in bed, he would still have something to look at, instead of just a blank ceiling. He looks around the room, for something he can attach to the ceiling. He doesn’t have any stars, and he doesn’t think there’s anything glow in the dark, either. He looks at the meta’s suit, at all the small bits and pieces. He begins to take it apart, standing on his bed, arranging the pieces on the ceiling and sticking them on with glue he found in his bag. They don’t form a pattern, just bits and pieces here and there on the ceiling, just like the stars in the night sky, not placed in a pattern on purpose, but just scattered haphazardly across the cosmos, as humans make up stories and pictures and lines that connect them, even though they're millions of miles away from each other.

He looks up at the pieces, and he can almost see Orion among them, if he squints. He can see a smiley face, the same as the one Caboose had pointed out in the night sky one night, that Tucker had never been able to unsee. He wonders how many pictures were seen in the night sky that no one ever told anyone about, how many people stood, outside, making up their own stories about the stars that never made it into any journals or history books, that never existed outside of their mind.

He stares up at the suit, and for the first time, he doesn’t feel resentment when he looks at it. It’s scattered into pieces, used to make something new, and maybe Church is, too. Maybe his tiny bits of code are out there being used to make something else, little bits of energy powering a light bulb. Maybe, Church isn’t nowhere, maybe the suit isn’t empty.

Maybe Church is everywhere, and he only has to look.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi so i wrote this during school, as i do, and i almost started crying in the middle of class. And anyways this is basically just me using tucker as a vessel to just ramble. I didn't write this on purpose but i like it so other people get to see it too.  
> Anyways check me out on [tumblr](https://gwenjamin.tumblr.com/)


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